Battery recycling takes deadly toll in Africa

Then it took the children. Toddlers stopped talking and their
legs gave out. Women birthed stillborns. Infants withered and died.
Some said the houses were cursed. Others said the families were
cursed.

The mysterious illness killed 18 children in this town on the
fringes of Dakar, Senegal's capital, before anyone in the outside
world noticed. When they did — when the TV news aired parents' angry
pleas for an investigation, when the doctors ordered more tests,
when the West sent health experts — they did not find
malaria, or polio or AIDS, or any of the diseases that kill
the poor of Africa.

They found lead.

The dirt here is laced with lead left over from years of
extracting it from
old car batteries. So when the price of lead quadrupled over
five years, residents started digging up the earth to get at it. The
World Health Organization says the area is still severely
contaminated, 10 months after a government cleanup.

The tragedy of Thiaroye Sur Mer gives a glimpse at how the
globalization of a modern tool — the car battery — can wreak havoc
in the developing world.

As the demand for cars has increased, especially in China and
India, so has the demand for lead-acid
car batteries. About 70 percent of the lead manufactured
worldwide goes into car batteries, which are also used to power TVs
and cell phones in some areas.

Both the manufacturing and the recycling of these batteries has
moved mostly to the
Third World. Between 2005 and 2006, four waves of
lead poisoning involving batteries were reported in China.
And in the Vietnamese village of Dong Mai, lead smelting left 500
people with chronic illnesses and 25 children with brain damage
before the government shut it down three years ago, according to San
Francisco-based OK International, which works on environmental
standards for battery manufacturing.

Thiaroye Sur Mer is a town of 100,000 where yearly rains leave
people wading through knee-deep water inside their cement-block
houses. A train track bisects the town and daily trains speed
through just a few steps from homes. The ocean used to supply a
livelihood, but fishing hasn't been good the past few years. Young
men have increasingly taken to trying to sneak into
Europe aboard
large canoes with outboard motors.

For years, the town's blacksmiths extracted lead from car
batteries and remolded it into weights for fishing nets. It's a
dangerous, messy process in which workers crack open the batteries
with a hatchet and pull small pieces of lead out of skin-burning
acid. The work left the dirt of Thiaroye dense with small lead
particles.

Then the price of lead climbed, and traders from India came and
asked about the dirt. They offered to buy bits of lead by the bag
for 60 cents a kilogram, says Coumba Diaw, a middle-aged mother of
two.

So Diaw dug up the dirt with a shovel and carried bags of it back
to her house. There, she sat outside and separated out the lead with
a sifter. It took just an hour of sifting to make what she did in a
day of selling vegetables at the market. She kept her two daughters
nearby as she worked.

Women all over the neighborhood did the same, creating dust
clouds of lead.

Then the sicknesses started. The deaths came, one after another,
over the five months from October 2007 through March 2008.

At first, people thought it was
malaria or
tuberculosis. Doctors at the local health clinic kept seeing the
same symptoms with no response to treatment and started running more
tests.

That's when Demba Diaw's 4-year-old daughter died. First she got
a bad fever. Then she started vomiting. Diaw, a 31-year-old teacher
at an Islamic school, thought it was malaria and took her to the
hospital. The next day she was dead.

"The doctors couldn't say what she died of," says Diaw. His voice
rises as he talks, and he spits out the words. He shows a picture of
his daughter that he carries with him, and the plastic casing of a
lead battery.

Diaw started talking to other parents whose children had the same
symptoms. They were spending more money each day for more lab tests
but not getting any answers. So he called the local media and held a
news conference to demand an investigation.

At about the same time, the hospital confirmed
lead poisoning.
The World Health Organization was called in.

The government ran blood tests on relatives of the dead children.
Their mothers and siblings were found to have lead levels of 1,000
micrograms per liter. Just 100 micrograms per liter is enough to
impair brain development in children.

A block from Diaw's house, the illness struck his niece,
two-year-old Raminatou, the child Coumba Diaw carried on her back.

"It started with a fever. Her skin was hot. She would tremble and
her eyes would roll back. She would drool. Her legs would splay out.
She cried all the time," says Coumba Diaw. She speaks without
emotion, recounting the events as if it all happened to someone
else.

Diaw rushed her daughter to the hospital. Now that they knew the
problem, they saved Raminatou.

The cleanup started in March, but was not extensive, residents
say. On a side street in Thiaroye Sur Mer, a man points out a pile
of sacks full of lead pellets that have sat against a wall for
months through the rainy season. He says someone ditched the sacks
there when they heard the lead was dangerous, and they were missed
by the cleanup operation.

About 950 people have been continuously exposed to lead dust in
the neighborhood, and many children show signs of neurological
damage, according to WHO. The sifting tossed lead particles into the
air where people could inhale it.

In richer countries, recycling of lead batteries is regulated.
Most U.S. states require anyone who sells
lead-acid batteries to collect spent ones and ship them to
recycling plants licensed and regulated by the
Environmental
Protection Agency.
Europe has
similar oversight.

"It's when you get to Third World countries where you don't have
regulations or attempts to control the movement of this product that
you see these kind of tragedies occurring," says Maurice Desmarais,
executive director of Battery Council International, a U.S.-based
trade group.

Although North
America and Europe continue to be the world's biggest buyers
of cars, fewer and fewer
car batteries
are made there. Manufacturing has moved where labor is cheaper and
environmental protections regulations are more lenient, or at least
more leniently enforced.

"There's not a developing country where this isn't happening,"
says Perry Gottesfeld, of OK International.

Most in Thiaroye say they will never go back to sifting dirt for
lead. But some still don't believe it is dangerous.

Mohamadou Diagne, a scrap metal trader, says he hasn't bought any
lead since the poisonings became known. But he says he grew up
cracking open batteries for lead, and he hasn't been poisoned. He
has not had his blood tested for lead.

"My father is 75. He's never had any problems," he says.

An Indian buyer about a half-mile away from the town still has a
large yard full of battery casings and sacks of lead pellets. The
company used to buy some of the lead dug up in Thiaroye.

Workers there confirm that they ship the lead and batteries out
of the country but won't give further details. The owner declined a
number of requests for an interview.

The government has stripped the top layer of dirt from the roads
with earthmovers and is paying the hospital bills of anyone sickened
by the lead. That's at least 55 children to start, and likely more
once the testing is finished.

The World Health Organization says there's still so much lead in
the ground that the area is toxic. The government wants to relocate
the entire neighborhood. But Demba Diaw says the government just
wants to profit from the lead in their earth, and Coumba says this
is her only home.

Like many other families, the Diaws are too poor and too rooted
to move. So they will stay where the lead poisons the earth.